July 27, 2012

Ad Contrarian Bails Out Facebook

As you probably know, Facebook announced their earnings yesterday and the men in the grey suits on Wall Street were not happy. Shares in Facebook dropped 10% in after-hours trading after falling 8.5% earlier in the day. Facebook shares were already selling for less than a toasted raisin bagel with light cream cheese, so this was not a good thing.

One thing we don't want is for the men in grey suits to get angry at us again. Remember when they did that in 2008 and took away all our money and give it to General Motors? So here at The Ad Contrarian Global Headquarters we knew we had to do something.

We called an emergency meeting of the executive board of The Ad Contrarian Foundation and the board voted to donate $250 to Facebook.

Here's what we're doing. We have produced an ad to appear on Facebook. It's about our semi-brilliant, not-quite-best-seller 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising. The ad is guaranteed to have a negative ROI because the cost-per-click I brilliantly negotiated is higher than the profit I make on each sale. So even if every click results in a sale, I still lose my ass. Pretty slick, huh?

But you know what? That creepy Zuckerberg kid needs the money more than I do.

Now here's the fun part. As you read here earlier this week, banner ads with nothing in them -- blank ads -- outperformed Facebook ads in a research experiment. So I got together with the president of my agency (the lovely and annoying Sharon Krinsky) and we decided to do another experiment. What if we produced ads that were less than nothing. What if we insulted and ridiculed our target audience? How would those ads perform?

We decided the target audience for the ads should be people who bought Facebook stock -- if they are stupid enough to buy that, they'll buy anything.

Then we needed a headline that would be nice and insulting. But here's the hard part. In a Facebook headline you're not allowed more than 25 characters. We struggled over this one for almost 15 minutes (twice as long as the average creative team spends on a Facebook ad.) Finally it came to us. The headline is Click Here Sucker! We felt that the exclamation mark added that certain amateur quality that makes online advertising so appealing.

Then we needed to write some body copy that in 90 characters appeared momentarily earnest but ended in ridicule. Here's what we came up with: "101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising" A must read for anyone in marketing or jail.

We are not looking forward to pissing away $250 dollars, but we are proud to have helped our friends at Facebook. They have provided us with mountains of fun-packed material. It's the least we can do.

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers always overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"As an advertising medium, the web is like communism. It's never very good right now, but it's always going to be great some day."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"In the entire history of civilization, nothing good ever happened to a teenager after midnight."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."